Posts filed under 'Energy Efficient Heating & Cooling'
While building a new home in northern Italy, a young family did not think twice about using energy efficient features to reduce their dependence on the expensive energy sources.
First of all, the house has a well insulated building envelope, where external walls (45cm thick) and the roof have multiple layers of insulation (placed on the cold/outer side of the wall). The windows also are multipane with energy emmisivity characteristics to reduce energy loss trough the glass and frames.
The most interesting feature of their energy efficient home is the Solar Hot Water system. It consists of two small collector panels, (total area of 2.8 m2, or ~9 ft2), set of connecting pipes, hot water tank (300 lit, ~80 gal) along with solar pumping station and expansion tanks. The system is filled with a refrigerant (antifreeze, antiboil) that exchanges the energy with the water in the tank through a built in coil heat-exchanger.
Solar panels are built in to the roof structure, set flush with the tiles providing minimal interference with any other structure on the roof while receiving good accessibility for service. The SHW system is manufactured by Sonnenkraft, a company from neighboring Austria. Total installed cost in 2005 was €5000 (about $6000 at 2005 exchange rate). The system supplies ample hot water for ALL hot water needs during months of May to October when the family switches off their gas burner completely.
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October 22nd, 2008
It seems that Europeans are readily adopting Green technologies and incorporating them in their everyday life.
An example of that is a Solar Hot Water system installed on a home in Hannover in northern Germany. Shortly after they purchased their new home, family Heinrich decided to upgrade their heating system and augment it with Solar Hot Water panels to harvest the sun’s free energy to supplement their heating and hot water needs.
The system consists of two sets of solar collectors (5.6m2 area each), three hot water tanks (635 liters total capacity), a set of pumps and controllers and even includes an enclosed fireplace in the system. Solar collectors heat the antifreeze fluid that circulates trough a pipe system in the panels, which is then routed to a heat exchanger that transfers the heat to the water in the tanks. One of the tanks is purely to supply hot water for the heating needs, another is for storing a drinkable hot water, while the third, the smallest tank is to accept any excess heat on the days when the sun is hot and the hot water needs are low.
System has been functioning flawlessly so far and Heinrich family is already seeing considerable reduction in their natural gas bills.
Full details about the system and images can be found on http://www.creategreenhome.com/Green_Project_SHW_Germany.htm
July 18th, 2008
Recently I attended a web cast where the topic was on energy efficiency.
The author made a number of provocative statements but the main message was that since improvements in energy efficiency have been a constant effort in the past decades, are we running out of the potential for further improvement? For many, energy efficiency is seen as one of the crucial elements of achieving a sustainable energy use. But, unfortunately, as soon as we make something more efficient (refrigerator, vehicle engine..), soon after we strive for bigger of the same. Refrigerators are huge today, our car and SUV engines are ever more powerful. How do we know know how much refrigeration space we really need? Perhaps our European counterparts can teach us something?
I say that one of the ways to actually make a mark on the environment is to adopt more energy efficient practices, technologies and solutions. For example, in the building industry, our current and currently developing housing stock is still way substandard and slow in adopting available energy efficient technologies and practices (insulation, windows, heating/cooling, passive solar building practices…). Since buildings are a biggest contributor to greenhouse gases, let’s start making them more efficient now.
June 23rd, 2008
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